Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Welcome to Porchlight International for the Missing & Unidentified. We hope you enjoy your visit.


You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.


Join our community!


If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
Rockefeller,Michael Nov 18, 1961; New Guinea
Topic Started: Oct 23 2006, 09:28 PM (615 Views)
Ell
Member Avatar
Heart of Gold
[ *  *  * ]
Michael Rockefeller, Nov. 18, 1961: The son of Nelson Rockefeller was buying art and exploring the southern coast of western Papua New Guinea when he disappeared in a boat off the coast, about 150 kilometers southeast of Timika. He was declared legally dead in 1964

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/vol1...hair.side4.html
Ell

Only after the last tree has been
cut down;
Only after the last fish has been
caught;
Only after the last river has been
poisoned;
Only then will you realize
that money cannot be eaten.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Ell
Member Avatar
Heart of Gold
[ *  *  * ]
Michael Rockefeller
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Michael Clark Rockefeller (born 1938 - died November 18, 1961?), was the youngest son of New York Governor and former Vice President Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Todhunter Rockefeller and a fourth generation member of the Rockefeller family. He disappeared during an expedition in the Asmat region of southwestern New Guinea.

Rockefeller graduated from Harvard University cum laude in 1960, served for six months as a private in the U.S. Army, then went on an expedition for Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology which studied the Dani tribe of western New Guinea. The expedition produced Dead Birds, a renowned ethnographic documentary film produced by Robert Gardner, and for which Rockefeller was the sound recordist. Rockefeller and a friend briefly left the expedition to study the Asmat tribe of southern New Guinea. After returning home with the Peabody expedition, Rockefeller returned to New Guinea to study the Asmat and collect Asmat art.

"It's the desire to do something adventurous," he explained, "at a time when frontiers, in the real sense of the word, are disappearing."

On November 18, 1961, Rockefeller and Dutch anthropologist René Wassing were in a 40-foot dugout canoe about three miles from shore when their double pontoon boat was swamped and overturned. Their two local guides swam for help, but it was slow in coming. After drifting for some time, Rockefeller said to Wassing "I think I can make it" and swam for shore. Wassing was rescued the next day, while Rockefeller was never seen again, despite an intensive and lengthy search effort. At the time, Rockefeller's disappearance was a major world news item. No body was found, and he was finally declared dead in 1964.

Most believe that Rockefeller either drowned or was attacked by a shark or crocodile. Because headhunting and cannibalism were still present in some areas of Asmat in 1961, some have speculated that Rockefeller was killed and eaten by local people. In the years immediately following his disappearance, rumors surfaced periodically of a white man living among the local peoples; this has no credibility to those who are familiar with the area.

In 1969, the journalist Milt Machlin traveled to New Guinea to investigate Rockefeller's disappearance. He dismissed reports of Rockefeller's living as a captive or as a Kurtz-like figure in the jungle, but concluded that there was circumstantial evidence to support the idea that he was killed. Several leaders of Otsjanep village, where Rockefeller likely would have arrived had he made it to shore, were killed by a Dutch patrol in 1958. Neither cannibalism nor headhunting in Asmat were indiscriminate, but rather were part of a tit-for-tat revenge cycle, and so it is possible that Rockefeller found himself the inadvertent victim of such a cycle started by the Dutch patrol.

A book called "Rocky Goes West" by author Paul Toohey claims that, in 1979, Rockefeller's mother hired a private investigator to go to New Guinea and try to resolve the mystery of his disappearance. The reliability of the story has been questioned, but Toohey claims that the private investigator swapped a boat engine for the skulls of the three men that a tribe claimed were the only white men they had ever killed. The investigator returned to New York and handed these skulls to the family, convinced that one of them was the skull of Rockefeller. If this event did actually occur, the family has never commented on it.

Many of the Asmat artifacts Rockefeller collected are part of the Michael C. Rockefeller collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The band Guadalcanal Diary wrote a song about Rockefeller's disappearance, which appeared on their 1986 album Jamboree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Rockefeller
Attached to this post:
Attachments: AAA.jpg (7.35 KB)
Ell

Only after the last tree has been
cut down;
Only after the last fish has been
caught;
Only after the last river has been
poisoned;
Only then will you realize
that money cannot be eaten.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Ell
Member Avatar
Heart of Gold
[ *  *  * ]


[ Hide Images | T- | T+ | Print Page ]
Story Location: http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murd...ller/index.html


MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER
"Michael, You're Mad" By David Krajicek

Michael Rockefeller was in a pickle that all the money in the world couldn't fix.



Michael Rockefeller


He was clinging to an overturned catamaran in roiling waters off the coast of New Guinea, where he had gone on an adventure to collect primitive art. He reckoned he had two choices.

He could hold on to the bobbing hull and hope for an uncertain rescue, or he could swim for shore, roughly 5 miles away.

The current was against him, and he risked a confrontation with a shark or crocodile.

He decided to swim for it.

He was, after all, a Rockefeller, scion of the fabled family of industrialists, philanthropists and politicians.

Just before he set off, Rockefeller, 23, tried to reassure his catamaran companion, a Dutch anthropologist named Rene Wassink. Wassink, a poor swimmer, had decided to stay with the overturned boat, and he tried to persuade the stubborn Rockefeller against his plan.



Rene Wassink


Jerry-rigging a life preserver, he emptied two gasoline cans into the Arafura Sea, tightened the lids and bound them together with rope. He stripped down to his underwear and bound his spectacles to his head with twine.

And off he went, paddling toward the forbidding mangrove swamps that lined the southwest coast of the world's second-largest island.

Wassink watched the swimming figure slowly disappear into the watery horizon.

The Dutchman was rescued just nine hours later, on Nov. 19, 1961.

But Michael Rockefeller was lost, and that was big news around the world. His family was American financial and political royalty. Michael was the great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil Co., and son of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Gov. Rockefeller and Michael's twin sister rushed to New Guinea after word of his disappearance reached civilization. They were followed closely by more than 100 journalists.

They searched frantically for 10 days at what the press called the end of the earth, where Stone Age cultures had survived. Finally, Nelson Rockefeller held a press conference to say that he had reached the conclusion that his son had died at sea before reaching shore.

With a stiff upper lip, he boarded a chartered jet back to the U.S., and the story retreated from the front pages.

But over time, the disappearance of the earnest, intelligent and impossibly wealthy young man entered American lore, joining a pantheon of missing persons that includes Ambrose Bierce, Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa and D.B. Cooper.

As with each of the other lost luminaries, various theories about Michael Rockefeller's fate have been floated over the years.

Did he simply drown, as his family concluded? Or did he decide to go native and lose himself in the jungles of New Guinea? Was he a meal for a shark or a crocodile? Or, in the most sensational speculative twist, was he a pale human trophy for New Guinean headhunters?


http://www.crimelibrary.com/features/fea_p...ller/index.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ell

Only after the last tree has been
cut down;
Only after the last fish has been
caught;
Only after the last river has been
poisoned;
Only then will you realize
that money cannot be eaten.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
« Previous Topic · Missing Persons 1961 · Next Topic »
Add Reply